Your Right to Know

WASHINGTON — Otis Bowen, a small-town doctor who served two terms as governor of Indiana
and later led efforts to respond to the AIDS crisis as the first physician to head the U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services, died in a nursing home in Donaldson, Ind., on Saturday. He
was 95.

Indiana Gov. Mike Pence announced the death in a statement on Sunday. The cause was not
disclosed.

In December 1985, Dr. Bowen replaced Margaret Heckler as President Ronald Reagan’s secretary of
health and human services. Bowen, a Republican, was known for working with members of both
parties.

He counted as his greatest accomplishment engineering the first major expansion of Medicare
through a 1988 bill providing coverage to the elderly for catastrophic illnesses. Congress repealed
the provision a year later.